Software
as a Service is the way to go
'Chorus chooses SaaS
tool for cabinet 'sausage factory' '
August 2008 - ComputerWorld NZ
 Telcom's
network company, Chorus, has
a huge task ahead of it: deploying
and installing 3,600 network
cabinets all around the country,
over four years, to shorten our
local loops and boost national
broadband speeds.
To meet that target it has to build, dispatch and install five
cabinets a day, each day, every day, just in time. IDC telecommunications
analyst Rosalie Nelson has described the effort as unprecedented
in its scope.
For that reason, it is not a project Chorus is undertaking on its
own: the company only has around 180 employees. A host of contractors,
partners, consultants and others are involved, from obtaining resource
consents to commissioning the cabinets. Chorus was building and
deploying cabinets before the major cabinetisation project got
under way. However, this was done as batch manufacturing.
 To
meet the demands of the new project
- and ramp up from go cabinets
a year to 1200 - this had to
be converted to flow manufacturing,
where cabinets are produced,
dispatched and installed in quick
sequence. All of the dispersed
stakeholders and contractors
to the project need to be provided
with up-to-date information and
reporting and Chorus needs to
be able to track progress closely
- in real-time, in fact.
To support that job, it selected a software as a service (SaaS)
management tool called iToolsonline. Leading the Chorus effort,
as project sponsor, is fibre-to-the-node (FttN) pro- gramme manager
Ed Beattie and project manager Colin MacDonald. MacDonald says
what was needed was not so much a project management tool, but
a tool to manage the lifecycle of the project and the relationships
with service providers.
Beattie says there are a lot of inputs into the project, a lot
of suppliers to it and each of these has milestones to meet. Each
supplier needs access to and the ability to generate up-to-date
information in the system. "If something happened this afternoon,
we'd know about it this after- noon," he says.
iToolsOnline not only tracks activity, but stores critical project
documents that need to be accessed, such as build and design documents
for cabinets and resource consents. Beattie says quite a few tools
were looked at during the selection. A key criteria was simplicity,
so the tools would be easy to teach, intuitive and, given the access
requirements, web-based.
Cost was also a factor. MacDonald says Chorus spent a long time
looking at its options. Site visits were made to one other local
user, Auckland City Council, and other user references, at Air
New Zealand and Fonterra, considered. The selection represents
Chorus' first move into Saas. Beattie says the system produces
detailed, but not complex, reports. Given the high profile of the
fibre-to-the-node project, and the requirement to report to Telecom
CEO Paul Reynolds, that was essential.
MacDonald adds that the system provides a powerful management dashboard
for snapshot project overviews. This includes traffic-light warnings
to help manage risk areas. The iToolsOnline system appears likely
to live on at Chorus well beyond the end of the FttN project. The
company is now integrating its other network building activities
into the Saas tool.
Courtesy
of COMPUTERWORLD NZ
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